Baby's Day Out

Over the next few weeks, Elizabeth and Jason read up on everything they'd need to know to deliver at home, "to see if this is something that's smart or a dumb idea," Elizabeth remembers. Though Jason wasn't as into the natural stuff as his wife was, he supported her decision and studied female anatomy so that he could help in case of an emergency. By the end of July, they'd decided to go with a freebirth.

With out-of-hospital births, it's the unintended scenarios that get the publicity. During the December blizzard, paramedics in Fort Collins had to use snowmobiles and a front-end loader to help three women who'd gone into labor.

A couple of years earlier, a 911 dispatcher in Denver had to coach a teenager through the birth process when the baby's father and firefighters failed to arrive in time. "You were there when I couldn't be," the father told the dispatcher afterward. "Even if I was there, I couldn't have done anything."

Some of the situations are more tragic. In February, eighteen-year-old Addie Kubisiak was arrested after a newborn's body was found in the ceiling panel of her Western State College dorm room. But the first-degree murder charges were dropped after it was determined that the baby, who'd been born in Kubisiak's car as she drove from her home in Parker, had been stillborn. Sensational stories of abandoned newborns regularly reveal women giving birth in all types of bizarre locations: seedy motels, prison cells, nightclub restrooms, movie theaters, alleys.

But though such episodes run high with peril and drama, they do not represent the average home birth. They do not represent official home births at all.

Since 1989, when Colorado's health department began collecting data on birth attendants and delivery locations, the number of home births has steadily risen from under 400 annually to over 700 in 2005. The vast majority of those babies were delivered by the fifty midwives who are certified in Colorado. Statistics show that there are no greater rates of complications or death associated with assisted home birth.

Midwives aren't the only ones catching babies at home, though. That same year, 88 births were listed as being attended by the husband, 47 babies were delivered by the women themselves, and 90 labor assists were credited to "Other," a category that could include anyone from a relative to a taxi driver. While some of these out-of-hospital, non-midwife births can be attributed to accidents or were necessitated by poverty or geographic isolation, many were by choice.

Rixa Freeze, a doctoral student at the University of Iowa, is writing her thesis on the very unstructured freebirth movement. "By its very nature, there is no professionalism involved, because nobody's making money off of it," Freeze explains. "Nobody's advocating a necessity to become trained through an organization, because the whole idea is that this is not something that you need specialized training for -- because it's an inevitable, involuntary bodily function."

It may be an inevitable function, but childbirth is such a definitive moment in the lives of women that it can shape how they view the world and how they wish to present themselves as mothers and people. "A lot of women talk about unassisted birth as kind of being part of a larger paradigm shift in which they realize, 'Wait, we don't need to be slaves to authority figures,'" says Freeze, who delivered her daughter unassisted last fall. "We can take responsibility for our own life, become autonomous. Mothers know what's best for their children in all ways."

But the medical and legal communities do not necessarily agree with that philosophy, and many freebirthers operate in secrecy. Tips on how to avoid trouble with authorities fill the forum boards. Sometimes, freebirthers will obtain "shadow care" from doctors or midwives by visiting them for prenatal checkups without revealing that they have no intention of going to the hospital or calling the midwife once labor begins. Others avoid prenatal visits altogether, referring to them as "scare care" because they feel they'll be lectured or coerced into having a hospital birth.

And some keep it quiet for fear of bigger problems. In Nebraska, it is a misdemeanor for a husband to deliver his child in a non-emergency situation. And in 2005 in Florida, Mara McGlade had just delivered her second baby unassisted when she started hemorrhaging. She was taken to the hospital, where she died two days later. McGlade's mother-in-law and sister-in-law were convicted of practicing midwifery without a license and sentenced to two and a half years in prison last November.

"A lot of women don't even tell their family members that they did it unassisted," says Freeze. "Some will say they have a midwife, because they are their own midwife, and so it alleviates the fear of family members, and they feel like they're being semi-truthful. Some women actually never apply for birth certificates, or do it much, much later in the game. So even if you are actually looking at birth-certificate data, it's not very reliable."